Six cancer centers to share $540 million research gift

• Donation adds to money that established six research centers
• Some centers will study how cancer spreads%2C others will look at ways to prevent and thwart the disease
• The late Daniel Ludwig was a shipping magnate and real estate owner

In one of the largest-ever donations to cancer research, Ludwig Cancer Research of New York City announced today that it is contributing $540 million to try to resolve continuing mysteries about how cancer starts, spreads and can be thwarted.

The unrestricted money for six cancer research centers established by earlier Ludwig donations is intended as a final gift from the philanthropy founded by the late Daniel Ludwig, a shipping magnate and real estate owner, which has now contributed $2.5 billion globally to cancer research.

The six centers, launched in 2006 with initial grants from Ludwig, are each expected to invest their $90 million and spend the annual income from those investments – about $4 million to $5 million – to fund basic scientific research.

Each of the six centers will have a different research focus. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, scientists will address the problem of cancer's spread, known as metastasis.

"Metastasis is ultimately responsible for 90% of cancer-associated mortality," said cancer biologist Robert Weinberg, who directs the Ludwig Center for Molecular Oncology at MIT.

Despite the lethal power of metastasis, Weinberg said scientists still can't answer basic questions about it, such as: how do cancer cells get out of the primary tumor, how do they escape to form secondary tumors elsewhere in the body, "and finally, is it possible to attack cancer cells once they've launched metastases, or have they acquired a degree of resistance that will ultimately thwart all of our attempts to eliminate them?"

MIT will spend its money addressing these questions and will work collaboratively with a center at Harvard University, which will focus on why many drugs that are effective at treating the primary tumors still leave patients vulnerable to relapse.

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York will extend its research into the immune system as a tool for fighting cancer.

Stanford University, in Palo Alto, Calif., will focus on cancer stem cells – immortal cells which are believed to resist many cancer treatments.

The University of Chicago will study metastatic disease as well as hormone and radiation-based therapies.

The Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center in Baltimore will fund its work into cancer prevention and early detection.

Ludwig Cancer Research trustee Ed McDermott said he hopes the donation will spur other private-sector institutions to follow suit, to counter shrinking federal support.

Federal funding for cancer research was essentially flat from 2005-12 and fell nearly $300 million last year because of the across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration.

These cutbacks have made it difficult for scientists, even those at top institutions, to finance their day-to-day research, explore innovative ideas or train the next generation of researchers, they say. The Ludwig money, unlike federal dollars, is not restricted by topic or budget year.

"By having a permanent endowment that will generate funds to support research in perpetuity really will allow us to take on high-risk, high-reward research and permit our researchers to take a long view and aim for a bigger impact than normal grant cycles might allow," said oncologist George Demetri, co-director of Harvard's Ludwig Center, and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

Jody Schoger of The Woodlands, Texas, who blogs about her battle with metastatic breast cancer, said she is thrilled that so much of the donation will go toward understanding how to fight cancer once it has spread.

"This is like winning a research lottery," she said, adding that she hopes the money will lead to quick advances for patients like herself. "Living on chemo is not a good way to live."

Correction: An earlier version of this story said Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would work in parallel to address the problem of metastases. Rather, that will be the focus of the MIT center, while Harvard will focus on why some drugs effective against primary tumors still leave patients vulnerable to relapses.